Materials and biomaterials with tunable properties are useful in numerous applications ranging from tissue engineering and drug delivery to materials processing and recycling. A critical aspect of designing biomaterial carriers for cell and/or drug delivery is tuning and controlling the material's degradation behavior.
Current degradation technology uses hydrolysis and/or enzymatic degradation, which are sustained processes that offer minimal spatial or temporal control. Most synthetic biomaterials degrade via hydrolysis, which can occur throughout the bulk or only at the surface of a biomaterial and leads to a sustained and non-instantaneous mass loss, which may be undesirable. Current photopolymerization and photodegradation techniques require the use of a photosensitizer, and often have no spatial control.
There is a need for an improved degradation process that allows for spatial and temporal control of degradation.